


Phantom Limbs

by lily_briscoe



Category: Call the Midwife
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-03
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-09-21 17:50:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9560258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lily_briscoe/pseuds/lily_briscoe
Summary: A sort of coda to 6x01. Patsy's thoughts as she deliberates whether or not to go to Hong Kong, with some Delia love thrown in.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hey fam - wrote this last Friday, so it's not canon given 6x02, but didn't have time to type it up till today. Still wanted to share it, though. 6x02 wrecked me in the most beautiful way, and I think they handled Patsy's decision better than I did here (as always). Can't wait for our love to come back, but until then, fics :)

**Phantom Limbs**  

Patsy Mount needs a drink.

A strong drink – the kind that will burn at the back of her throat, smoothly running its course till it comes to rest warm and low in her stomach. The kind that will settle a haze over her mind, paint the walls of her heart with a fresh coat of steel.

The kind that’s stronger than she feels she is.

She has the presence of mind to change out of her uniform – but only just – before barreling down the stairs, past a bewildered Sister Winifred, and sending the front door heaving on its hinges. Street lamps blur pavement, road, and human being into one amorphous set of colors, like a jug of water spilled over a freshly painted canvas.

She ducks into the first pub she encounters down the Dock Road, its windows fogged and tables full to bursting, raucous with the lives of men. If one or two or ten of them look up at the chime of the door, taking in the sight of a sophisticated redhead wearing a crisp white shirt, tartan slacks, and a veil of sadness behind her Bette Davis eyes, she does not notice them. Her heels click up to the bar without hesitation, where she slaps down two quid and asks the barkeep to furnish her with all the whiskey – neat – that it can buy. Raising his eyebrows and shaking his head only slightly, the fellow tips a healthy serving into a tumbler and slides it toward a pair of tense, perfectly manicured hands.

Patsy knocks the whole thing back in one go, relishing in the satisfying sting that meets her senses. Boarding school nights of illicit whispers and less than legal activities have trained her well. The man behind the counter wordlessly refills the glass, equal parts impressed and troubled by the beautiful, sorrowful woman before him. But after years of serving dockers and seamen, mobsters and preachers, fathers and uncles and husbands and sons, he’s learned better than to wade into the seas of troubles of his customers. He leaves the bottle within reach of those pale hands, his eyes acknowledging the silent thanks of the blue pair opposite, and drifts down the bar to tend to other clientele.

Patsy chooses to savor her second drink, pairing it with a cigarette, replaying jagged memories as the liquor slips smoothly down.

She hurt Delia today.

The brunette forgave her once “Apologetic Pats” crept in with her doe eyes and her faint, repentant voice. That’s always the way with them, she thinks, taking a thoughtful drag. Never ones for dramatic rows – not that they could ever risk such volume in discussing their relationship in any form – their rough patches usually involve a sharp word from one, avoidance from the other, and an eventual coming together again when they hold each other close, apologies mingled with sweet nothings and pie-crust promises to never speak so again.

But even so, she hurt the woman she loves, because of someone else she loves, and not knowing how to spend that love overwhelms her. If she goes to her father’s side, she will hurt Delia again, along with the part of herself that belongs to her lover – nearly all of her.

But there is still one heartstring strung along family ties, and a piece of airmail and a telephone conversation have given it one sharp tug.

She must go.

Delia told her as much, her face resolute despite the pain under which its loveliness labored. She must go, and there’s an end to it. Patsy nodded solemnly, whatever words she might have spoken dulled and fallen useless before reaching her lips. Delia gathered her in her arms then, a warm, solid form curling around a frigid shell that soon melted in to fill the curves and lines. Delia kissed her until Patsy’s tears bled on both their cheeks, their foreheads meeting in a shared desire for closeness, to breathe the other’s air.

The brunette left for her next bout of training shortly after, her eyes lingering on her lover even as her hands left her skin, until the last sliver of space eclipsed at the closing of the door. She did not want to leave her, but Patsy insisted that she go. Better to start moving on with her life as soon as possible, striding toward a future even as Patsy prepares to step into her past, walking on legs as sturdy as a newborn foal’s.

As she polishes off her fourth glass, she has the slightly hazy consciousness to postulate that her actual, physical legs will be in a similar state in short order if she continues at this pace; but, defiantly, and with an air of gusto she does not feel, she shakes the last drops from the bottle into her glass. Her off day tomorrow really is proving to be quite fortuitous, she thinks with a dark chuckle. If there’s one thing in life Patience Mount has experienced enough to truly appreciate, it’s irony. Best to get positively sloshed, sleep the next day away, and bottle her problems – literally and figuratively – until there is no other choice but to face them.

She finishes this thought along with her drink, pouting slightly as she peers through an empty glass at an empty bottle. She stubs out her current cigarette in the nearest ashtray, its cinders mingling with that of four of its mates at various stages of smoldering. Her head is spinning at the speed she’d planned to achieve before setting to her task, so she leaves the bartender a hefty tip and the hint of a sad smile, slouching off the barstool with as much grace as a three-legged giraffe. Some chivalrous fellow patrons rise to offer their aid, but she waves them away with a languid, dismissive hand, making her way toward the exit.

Some part of her brain tells her walking along the docks in the late evening is less than safe, but her body carries her along the river as she fuzzily contemplates the oceans she will soon be crossing. When she’d first moved out of the nurses’ home, away from her love, she’d felt that Poplar might have been the moon. But now, oceans will lie between them, as will weeks – maybe months – and her heart constricts cruelly at the thought.

Oceans have never much bothered Patsy and her father. The emotional distance between them has always been the wider gulf, and their mutual silence has stretched into years over it. She had noticed that the checks he sometimes sends – the ones she routinely tears in half and deposits in the wastepaper bin – had borne the signatures of a progressively unsteady hand. She’d blamed age, infirmity, possibly arthritis; but the ravages of a disease rooted in a pain so unfathomable as this – it had never crossed her mind. She cannot envision it: that body, at once stoic and dynamic, full of strong yet quiet power, instead composed of frozen limbs and frightened eyes.

She grips the wooden bannister for support, her vision swimming, rippling, shifting like the moon on the water, and she suddenly feels cold, unencircled by arms that should be holding her.

“Delia,” she whispers softly on ragged breath, and starts a course for home.

The Welshwoman will not be best pleased to see her in this state, she knows, but Patsy can’t be bothered to care, hoping that the nurse will understand her reasons. Even if she doesn’t, the redhead will trade any verbal soothing for the feel of soft skin enveloping her and her sorrows.

She staggers through the front door of Nonnatus, thankful that the hall lies vacant and hopeful that all are abed, only to detect the faint sound of the gas burning in the kitchen. She follows its hum to find a now-familiar sight: Delia stirring a batch of Bournvita on the hob in a set of borrowed striped pajamas, cuffs duly rolled up.

The brunette makes a startled about-face at the heavy sound of Patsy’s inebriated footsteps, concern etched across her features.

“Pats,” she breathes, and Patsy loses her breath. The midwife’s knees nearly buckle at the relief overflowing from the words. “I was half-sick with worry, _cariad_. Where have you been?”

Patsy shuffles further forward, finding purchase on a kitchen chair for support.

“Nowhere.”

Delia shuts off the burner with a vexed click.

“You’re drunk.”

The redhead pouts.

“Very.”

Eyes clench in thinning patience, a Welsh dragon of a temper being tamed in the ensuing silence.

“Let’s get some fluids down you, then,” the younger woman replies, filling a glass from the tap. “Preferably non-alcoholic.”

Patsy accepts the water gratefully, imbibing in great gulps as she comes to sit, Delia pulling a chair up beside her.

“Tell me.”

Patsy finishes her water, her eyes darting around the room and its environs.

“Nuns,” she gasps, barely having swallowed.

“Everyone’s asleep or on a call-out,” she is reassured. “So tell me, Pats. Tell me what it is you can’t face.”

Her eyes squeeze tightly shut, her whole body seeming to wince.

“I can’t face losing someone again.”

The clarity is a shock to her – given the state of her body and of the thoughts that have been blowing round her head like leaves for the better part of three hours.

“I watched my mother and sister die slowly, not in control of their bodies, or even of their minds. I can’t watch that happen to him, too.”

The tears come unbidden, and they fall next to Delia’s on the tablecloth. A small hand comes to twine with hers, and she looks up at her love.

“And I can’t face losing more time with you. I’ve already lost however much I could bear to. I won’t take myself from you after you were taken from me. Not for anything.”

She hates that her words slur slightly, because she means them with the certainty and weight of stone, but she recognizes that they might not have been spoken at all without a little liquid courage.

“ _Cariad_ , family is not supposed to be easy,” Delia begins. “Your mother and Nancy – he lost them, too. But he never got the chance to say goodbye. He wants to say goodbye to you. You cannot deny him that.”

Patsy looks as though she wants to protest, but Delia carries on.

“And as for me, I will wait however long it takes for you to come home to me. I shall write to you so often they’ll have to send two airmail planes to Hong Kong every day. I will be beside you in almost every way, in your memories of me and my memories of you. And the woman who was strong enough to sit by my bedside, to write to me, to never stop loving me when those memories had left me – she’s strong enough for anything.”

It is then that Patsy breaks.

Fully, uncontrollably, collapsing into her lover’s arms like she is the sole source of oxygen in a suddenly airless world. She weeps for every loss, for every lingering weight that rests on the trembling surface of her soul, for every minute of love ever stolen from her.

And Delia strokes her hair and calls her darling, and she loves her for that.

Once Patsy has calmed somewhat, and drunk two more glasses of water, Delia leads her upstairs with a dose of aspirin and a cup for the morning. A tear-stained face is scrubbed clean, and soft cotton is slid along tired, aching bones.

When Patsy falls asleep, it is with limbs woven and fingers knotted with her own, well and truly surrounded by a love so present, so palpable, that a nascent flower of hope begins to weave its roots along the cracks in the pavement of her skid-marked heart.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed :) Thinking of writing a draft of Delia's letter that she slipped in Patsy's suitcase if I get the time this weekend. Can't wait to read what the rest of you have in store :)


End file.
